Newsletter

ANTHONY STASTNY: Match-up of
top-5 teams lifts ACC

If it seems like you’ve read about SEC football all season, well, it’s because you’ve read about SEC football all season.

You and all the other football fans in America.

Any national football discussion starts in Alabama, winds through Texas and Arkansas and meanders through most of the South.

The conversation can go anywhere from there. It just does not venture into Atlantic Coast Conference territory very often.

Florida State and Clemson changed all that Saturday, for at least one shining day.

Alabama is still the colossus of college football. SEC heavyweights still litter the landscape.

The league still has the reigning Heisman Trophy winner and you can pencil the SEC Championship game winner for the BCS title game.

But game of the week?

This week that belonged to Florida State and Clemson.

Nothing in college football is as it used to be. Back in the day, say before the BCS, respectable conferences could argue their respective merits. Pac-12, Big Ten, Big 12, ACC — all could make cases for their merits. Frequently, that argument had merit. The bowl system did not produce a national champion, but it also did not did dent regional pride. The Big (Number Here) conferences could still make their arguments.

Now, the SEC puts a lie to that every January.

You have to ask: Is this good for college football?

If you are an SEC team, yes. If you are one of the hordes that aren’t? Not quite.

And that is exactly why No. 3 Clemson vs. No. 5 Florida State was such a good thing for the hordes.

This is a game that offered high rankings, national prestige and a direction other than southeast to the national title race.

Both teams are social climbers.

Clemson has one national title. It was won when the team was coached by Danny Ford, who was once quoted as saying he wouldn’t walk across the street to watch golf.

With his teams at Clemson, there was plenty of reason not to.

The intervening years haven’t been so kind. Clemson’s fortunes have sagged with the conference’s.

Before this team showed the promise of this season two years ago, Clemson’s last 10-win season was 1990.

Sure, there were a handful of nine-win seasons, but there were a couple of 5-6s and even one 3-8.

Not what you expected from a team that had four 10-win seasons and one 12-0 jewel in the 1980s.

The Tigers knocked off Georgia, and yes, it was the opener for the Bulldogs. But ... it was the opener for the Clemson as well.

Facing the Tigers was Florida State. This is the school that Bobby Bowden brought to prominence by playing anyone with a field and on any day TV would show up.

But prominence is a ravenous beast, and eventually it devoured Bowden as it has so many others.

FSU is the team that came into the conference and brought instant credibility. To play with the Seminoles, the thinking went, everyone would have to elevate their games.

Instead, FSU ran roughshod over the league, until it, too, forgot how to score touchdowns.

But Jimbo Fischer has awakened the echoes at Doak Walker Stadium. After a steady diet of Music City, Gator, Chick-fil-A and Champ Sports bowl, the Seminoles cashed an Orange Bowl check last season.

The glamour is back at both schools.

Two terrific quarterbacks lead two good teams.

FSU won 51-14.

But the real winner is the ACC.

Anthony Stastny is sports editor of the Savannah Morning News. Contact him at 912-652-0356 or anthony.stastny@savannahnow.com.